


you don’t remember what happened

by sturmundfrei



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Gen, I wrote this in a day idk what I'm doing, Identity Reveal, Memory Loss, Sort of anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 17:45:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5879950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sturmundfrei/pseuds/sturmundfrei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(what you remember becomes what happened)</p>
<p>Chat Noir loses his memory on the job. As Ladybug tries to bring him to safety, he de-transforms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you don’t remember what happened

**Author's Note:**

> Title from John Green’s _An Abundance of Katherines_.

It only takes a second for the world to change.

Fugue, their latest akumized enemy, cackles triumphantly and aims her toy crossbow. Her target is only fifty yards away and closing fast—Chat Noir, his mouth curved into his signature smirk, raising his staff to deflect the dart as he jumps from street light to street light. He makes it look as easy as strolling along the Seine on a sunny day.

When he’s only twenty yards away, Fugue fires.

Time seems to slow down. Ladybug watches the dart fly, her quick mind predicting its trajectory, and her eyes widen in horror. Her yo-yo flies out of her hand, hurtling at Fugue’s trigger arm, but she is too late. One second too late.

The dart punches through Chat Noir’s suit and embeds itself in his chest. Ladybug screams. The yo-yo winds around Fugue’s arm, the crossbow clatters to the ground, but none of that matters, because Chat Noir stares at her with those huge green eyes and then, like he’s only just realized he’s been hit, he topples sideways off the lamppost. He hits the pavement with a deafening _thud_ and stills, limbs sprawled black against the dull grey stone.

Fugue laughs her cackling laugh again. “I don’t remember you ever defeating your enemies without your kitty cat, Ladybug! So this fight will go down in history as the one you _lost_!”

She whips around, her pale features twisted in hate, and yanks on the yo-yo’s cord. Of course, the idea is to haul the frozen Ladybug in like a fish, but feeling the cord slip out of her fingers sends a shockwave through Ladybug’s mind, and she snaps to. With enormous effort, she braces herself against the ground. Her hold on the yo-yo is so strong that it throws Fugue off balance. The villain’s boot catches on the fallen crossbow. She stumbles forward and falls on her face at Ladybug’s feet.

Normally, this is where Ladybug says something witty and cracks the akumized item open. Instead, she pulls the archery association badge off Fugue’s feathered hat in silence. The yo-yo spins, a white butterfly flutters towards the night sky, and Ladybug sprints down the street to where Chat Noir is lying in a puddle of lamppost light. He hasn’t moved since he fell.

“Chat? Chat Noir?” Ladybug crouches by his side and curls her fingers around his shoulder, wanting to shake him awake but afraid it might hurt him. “Chat Noir, wake up, it’s me, the fight is over. Chat?”

He gives a sigh, like someone waking up from a deep sleep, and then opens his luminous eyes. They focus on her face, but Ladybug immediately realizes that something’s wrong. He furrows his brow in confusion and mumbles, “Wh—who are you?”

Her heart stops. Her fingers cramp, drilling into his shoulder, and for a moment all she can do is gawk at him. Of course she knows Fugue’s evil superpower is to inflict amnesia. The girl who got akumized had been unfairly ignored by her archery association in favor of a boy with slightly less skill. Still, the idea that it could have affected Chat Noir—no. _No._ Aren’t they superheroes? Aren’t they supposed to be untouchable? Indestructible?

“What do you mean?” she asks, trying for a light-hearted tone. “I’m Ladybug, silly!”

“Alright,” he says slowly. “And… who am I?”

Ladybug starts to tremble. She lets go of his shoulder, clasping her hands around her yo-yo instead, desperate for support. This can’t be happening.

“You’re Chat Noir,” she whispers. “You’re my—you’re my partner—I mean partner in crime, I mean against crime—no, you’re my…” Tears well up. “You’re my _friend._ ”

“Alright,” he repeats, but there’s no real understanding in his voice. He just stares at her blankly, as if he’s expecting her to dissolve like any other dream. Chat Noir’s confidence has been drained from him and even his eyes seem less green than before.

How can he not remember her? All those months fighting side by side, all his stupid flirty puns and his constant winking at her, the sticky situations, the fist bumps—they can’t simply be gone forever. He needs to remember. Ladybug needs him to remember.

“Chat Noir,” she tries again, “think, please, _think_. You know me, I promise you do!”

He narrows his eyes, takes in her appearance again. The strain shows on his face, even beneath the mask, and finally he sighs. “I—I don’t know. Maybe—but no. I don’t know.”

Ladybug latches onto the ‘maybe.’ Fugue hasn’t deleted his memories, only locked them away, she’s sure of it now. Relief floods her and she squeezes the yo-yo hard. Immediately, she knows what she has to do. Her Miraculous charm—it will revert all the damage done in the fight, it has to revert the memory loss, too. Why hasn’t she thought of this before?

She unties the yo-yo from her waist. At the same time, the glowing ring on Chat Noir’s right hand gives an alarming _beep_. Ladybug flinches, but forces down the panic in her throat. There’s still time. All she has to do is throw the yo-yo.

The ring beeps again. And again. And again. It beeps until it’s all Ladybug can hear, drumming in her ears. Her fingers freeze around the yo-yo and she knows she needs to change her plan.

She needs to get him out of sight—out of her own sight. Right now.

Luckily, the street is deserted. Fugue, free of the akuma, has fainted where she fell. She’s no threat, then. An upturned sandwich board at the end of the street catches Ladybug’s attention and a solution presents itself. She runs over and swiftly props the board up on its side in front of a building entrance. It stands there like an improvised folding screen, blocking the view for everyone coming down the left side of the street.

“It’ll have to do,” Ladybug whispers to herself and runs back to Chat Noir. He’s still lying on the ground, frowning at the furiously beeping ring, raising it to his face in a daze. Choking down her panic, Ladybug reaches under his arms and drags him to his feet. “This way!”

She pushes him towards the hideout, but there’s a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach. They aren’t moving fast enough, are they? The beeping is getter faster, isn’t it? She clenches her teeth. No time for panic, they will make it, they have to make it, _they have to_.

They’re barely ten yards away when the beeping stops. Ladybug stumbles. Chat Noir gives a heavy sigh—and the green light on his ring flickers out.

There’s no time to avert her eyes. A flash of neon green blinds her, but only for a moment. When Ladybug blinks away the last blotches of stray light, her gaze is automatically drawn to the body now lying on the pavement, limbs splayed in much the same way as earlier.

A white shirt over a black V-neck, artfully ruffled golden hair, a cute button nose, and a face that might as well have been the inspiration for Michelangelo’s David.

“ _Adrien_?” she breathes, and suddenly she’s Marinette, feeling the edges of her mask digging into her cheeks. Again she thinks _this can’t be happening_.

But it is happening.

She collapses on the ground, her chest heaving, fingers clawing at the pavement. Chat Noir, the other half of her secret life, the one she has spent so many nights running across the rooftops with, the one who always has her back—the one who flirts with her like his life depends on it—how can he be the same as Adrien, her classmate, her _crush_ of years and years, the one she can only stutter at, the one who doesn’t seem interested in her that way at all?

It feels like the world is rapidly shrinking around her, swirling like water running down a drain, drowning her. Spots are dancing across her field of vision. Marinette blinks, her eyelids fluttering like butterfly’s wings, until the buzzing in her ears ceases and she can see clearly again. She draws a deep breath. _Focus_ , she tells herself, _focus, what would Alya say, what would Tikki say?_

She looks up and her eyes fall on Adrien’s face again. The panic rushes to her throat, constricting it, but she swallows twice and fights back. At the same time, a black shape crawls out from beneath Adrien’s right arm—a disproportionately large head with cat’s ears and unnaturally green eyes, sharp teeth appearing as the creature yawns. It lifts his face up to Marinette and squints at her.

“Do you have any cheese?” it inquires.

“Wha—cheese?” Automatically, she pats her sides, but of course she comes up empty, the Ladybug suit doesn’t even have pockets. “Are you Chat Noir’s kwami?”

“Plagg,” he says, bowing. “At your service. Well, until I pass out, I am so _tired_.”

He sits down heavily to illustrate his point. Marinette’s eyes fill with tears. “I know who Chat Noir really is now.”

“Uh-uh.” The kwami pokes at Adrien’s jeans pocket, clearly not as invested in the conversation as she is and continuing his search for cheese.

“I’m not supposed to,” Marinette whispers in a small voice. “And he’s _Adrien_ , I mean, he’s—he’s the one person he _can’t_ be…”

“Why not?” Plagg shrugs. “Chat Noir can be anyone, just like Ladybug.”

“Yes, but –” Marinette sighs and her shoulders droop.

Why does her life have to be so complicated? Her crush on Adrien has always been just about the most normal thing about her. It makes her like any other teenage girl, it gives her something to dream about, maybe even something to look forward to when she leaves the Ladybug persona behind. It definitely isn’t something she wants involved in her secret life full of evil and supervillainy. Having to worry about Adrien’s safety is one thing, but having to worry about them both—that takes it to a whole new level. It’s going to interfere with their teamwork, how could it not?

And that, she suddenly realizes, isn’t even the worst part.

“He’s never going to know that I know,” she says quietly. “Once I use the Miraculous charm, everything will go back to normal, and he’ll have his memory back, and—I can never tell him. If I do, he’ll want to know who I am, and it wouldn’t be fair not to tell him, it wouldn’t be, and then…”

She can’t finish the sentence and hides her face in her hands. Plagg, who’d rested his head against Adrien’s leg and almost fallen asleep, opens one eye and grumbles something. It’s inaudible, but Marinette looks up anyway and wipes at the tears on her cheek.

“Can you help me?”

The kwami scratches his right whisker. “That depends on what you want, doesn’t it? You’re the one always saying you can’t know each other’s identity.”

“We can’t,” Marinette says, but when she looks at the still-unconscious Adrien again, her heart feels like it’s being squeezed by a warm, hopeful hand. If Chat Noir likes Ladybug, maybe Adrien can like Marinette. Maybe then they can become a team in both halves of their lives.

“See?” Plagg says, a knowing look on his face. “So what do you want?”

Something about his tone makes her wonder. She frowns at him, confused, then fumbles for her yo-yo. “Plagg,” she begins slowly, “is it possible that—I mean, will I still remember he’s Adrien after I use the Miraculous? Or does that count as part of Fugue’s damage?”

The kwami climbs up Adrien’s leg, marches across his hipbone and up his ribs, and nestles itself against Adrien’s chest, partially hidden inside his shirt. He closes his eyes and replies, in the most lethargic voice she’s ever heard a kwami use, “Do you want to remember?”

He promptly falls asleep. Marinette sits up, drying her face with her sleeve, and turns the yo-yo around in her hands. She needs to decide now—she’s already waited too long to wrap this up. With another look at Adrien’s serene face, she steels herself and rises to her feet.

“Miraculous Ladybug!”

The yo-yo spins as it flies into the sky.

\---

_Paris, two weeks later. Two dark silhouettes move swiftly between rooftops, briefly outlined against the starry sky as they leap from building to building. The one in front has cat ears that wiggle when he turns his head to look at his companion, his neon eyes sparkling. The other, dressed in red, returns his smile with a roll of her eyes, but the playfulness fades from her face as soon as the cat looks in front again. She feels a strange tug in her chest, like her heart is speaking to her in a language her mind doesn’t understand. It happens every time her companion looks at her with those green eyes. Sometimes, she wants to find out what it is, dig deeper into her memory, but most of the time, she tries to ignore it. Whatever it is, she reasons, it is too dangerous to chase._

_Besides, she and her cat have a job to do._

**Author's Note:**

> I’m new to this fandom and I have no idea what I’m doing. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!


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